Idle Thoughts

Before I start, let me make an admission - I have used the terms RSS/Hindutva and secular quite informally to describe specific views. Hope this does not offend you one way or the other. One of the charges that the ‘hindutva’ camp (as well as many others) level against the 'seculars' in this country is that their values are not really free of religious thought, but are rather closely aligned to Christian values. We can not dismiss this charge lightly as the seeds of secularism was nurtured in a culture where Christianity was the de facto religion. I don’t know if it is too early to announce that the tides are turning, but I have some evidence to show the influence of RSS thinking in the ‘secular’ response to Mohan Bhagwat statements on Mother Teresa. Mohan Bhagwat mentioned in one of his speeches that Mother Teresa did indeed help the destitute but she had an ulterior motive to convert them. According to him, this motive made her service less selfless and hence somewh...

Now coming back to the book itself, in what I write here, I might appear to be arguing with the book and the author and agreeing with them. But that is to be expected – we are dealing with a widely debated topic and it would be foolish to expect that the book would convince and convert me to its line of thinking. The book did successfully engage me in a debate with it and with myself. This being a book on democracy and healthy debates, I am sure that the author would be very pleased with the result that it has produced. The author starts out explaining why he named his book as The Intolerant Indian. More than those reasons, I thought it goes well with the more celebrated predecessors like The Argumentative Indian and The Scientific Indian. However, the content of the book is only so much about Intolerance of the Indian – the book talks more about the State than the people, and that too more about not being secular than being intolerant. So a title like ‘the non-secular India’, th...